What do you do during the evenings, after the day’s tasks are done, of work trips? You might be tired of being up in the air, or just simply tired. But depending on the jet lag, you might not find much sleep. I certainly don’t, even when there is no jet lag — I hate hotel beds. If you find yourself in a hotel that used to be one of Idi Amin’s torture chambers palaces, and your colleagues are fellow political junkies, you will likely talk about politics over a nightcap. So did we that rain-soaked Kampala evening. We talked about, among other things, Zimbabwe.

Why didn’t they get rid of him the old fashioned way, you know, APCs on the streets, tanks in front of the presidential palace, radio or TV broadcast by some unknown major…..

An old Africa hand explained why Robert Mugabe wasn’t toppled in a coup. No, it wasn’t because of his liberation cred. Kwame Nkrumah or Milton Obote were no less of independence heroes to their respective countries. Both were ingloriously booted out, not just of their presidential palaces, but also the countries they led to existence. At least they lived, unlike say Patrice Lumumba. Clearly being a national liberator figure didn’t make one coup-proof, particularly if one had turned his (can’t think of a mother of the nation top of my head!) country into a basket case, and had faced concerted political pressure from home and abroad. According to my colleague with years of experience in the continent, the key to Mugabe’s survival was in relative ‘latecomer’ status.

Mugabe came to power much later than was the case for other African founding fathers. And the disastrous denouement of his rule happened during a period when the great powers saw little strategic importance in regime change in an obscure corner of the world. The second factor meant there was no foreign sponsor to any coup. The former meant that any would be coupmaker, and their domestic supporters, knew from the experiences elsewhere in the continent about what could happen when a game of coups went wrong.

Mugabe gave them hyperinflation. Getting rid of him could lead to inter-ethnic war. Easier to do currency reform than deal with refugees fleeing genocide…..